The World Needs our Apples

We just returned from a fun mini-vacation down in San Francisco. I guess we needed to recover a bit more from our recent maxi-vacation in Europe. Anyway, we stayed one night, saw a stage production of The Wizard of Oz, had a wonderful seafood dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf and generally had a blast. On the way home, we stopped in Apple Hill. The fall colors were glorious and the apples showed up in abundance, in every way, shape, form and baked good you could possible imagine. Now I know there really is a difference between an apple turnover and an apple dumpling. Being inundated with apples got me thinking about abundance and where it comes from.

Where do the apples themselves come from? We might say they come from the roots or leaves of the tree or the soil or the sun or the DNA, and we wouldn’t be wrong. And still, the most complete answer for me is that they come from the Life within the tree (I capitalize the word because I see the Spirit of the divine in it; please feel free to insert any sized letters you might prefer). The apples come from the Intelligence that knows how to take some water and sunlight and carbon dioxide and minerals from the ground and make an apple. When the tree is dead, all those ingredients are still there, including the DNA, but you’ll never see another apple. Life in the tree manifests, creates, apples. The apples are the effect, Life is the cause.

When we tend an apple tree, we don’t have to tell it how to express apples or send it off to school to learn how, we just do our best to nurture it and provide it with the best conditions under which it can thrive. The tree already has everything it needs to express apples, and when conditions are right, we have apples up to our ears.

Where does our abundance come from? It comes from the same place that health, wholeness, love and joy come from. It comes from the Life within us; the life that we are. Just as the Spirit of the apple tree is always expressing apples (even in the winter when it’s resting because the conditions aren’t right), our God Self is always expressing the fruit of who we are: our gifts, our being, our presence, our love. Our job is to help establish the right conditions under which we can thrive so that we can give and receive these things in abundance. This is the source of all forms of abundance in our lives, even the green form. Money is the effect, WE are the cause.

One difference between the tree and you and I is that the tree never forgot any of this, and you and I undoubtedly have. Therefore, the tree never learned self-sabotage or self-judgment or self-pity or self-recrimination. In my life, I have mastered all of these at times. The tree never poisons its own roots. I’ve spent a lot of my life doing that, and I’m tired of it. So I do the work. The tree doesn’t need forgiveness work or self-help books or abundance seminars to re-discover its gift and provide the world with apples. You and I might have some work to do, only because we’ve forgotten.

The tree may not have forgotten, but all it knows to create is apples. You and I can create anything we can imagine, anything around which we center our consciousness. You might not be able to make a baked good out of what you and I can bring into the world, but that’s OK. The world isn’t suffering from a lack of baked goods, but perhaps it is suffering from a lack of the love and other gifts that you and I are currently not expressing.

So for me, “abundance work” is no different than any other spiritual practice. It’s about remembering who we are. When we remember, we can tap into our inner resources and be more open to creative ideas and opportunities, conditions that will surely help us manifest abundance in any form we choose. When we remember, we know that we are always bigger and stronger than any appearance of lack or limitation. And remembering can begin with the way we talk to ourselves and others. This has been my major focus of late. This is how we begin to establish the right conditions for our fruit to manifest in abundance.

Affirmations are a powerful tool for improving our self-talk. We can also upgrade our answers to those questions we hear all the time. The last time someone asked how you were doing, for instance, did you answer, “I always have more than enough because I am always more than enough” or “I am manifesting the life of my dreams and all the fruit that comes with it right now” or “All the abundance in this universe is unfolding through me and for me right here and right now”? If not, why not? As I’ve said recently about using this question as an opportunity to affirm our health and wholeness, we can choose to answer, “Who are you” instead of “How are you”, and affirm our true and natural state of abundance. The worst that can happen is that they’ll stop asking!

The world needs our apples! Happy creating!

And if that’s all we remember, that’s more than enough for now…

About BittmanBliss

Stew and Hillary Bittman are published authors, international public speakers and workshop leaders, healers, spiritual leaders and peaceful warriors. Coming from an eclectic and extensive background of spiritual traditions, they have inspired people all over the world with their practical message of hope and healing.
For over 20 years, The Bittmans have had a mission to awaken the awareness of oneness between the spiritual and the physical. They operated Safe Haven Chiropractic, a healing center based on donations only, for 23 years. Thousands of individuals and families were given the opportunity to embrace their gifts, pursue their dreams and find the peace and wholeness that reside within all of us. Stew and Hillary have traveled the world teaching the principles of life and have participated in 6 chiropractic missions in Central America, bringing those principles to manifestation for literally hundreds of thousands of people.
Currently, the Bittmans are the co-Spiritual Leaders of Unity at the Lake, a positive, trans-denominational, spiritual community in South Lake Tahoe, CA. They are on the road to becoming ordained Unity Ministers.